Wingware Python IDE

The Intelligent Development Environment for Python Programmers

Wing IDE Professional allows you to create and switch between subsets of the
IDE's tools, as appropriate for particular kinds of work, such as editing,
testing, debugging, working on documentation, and so forth.

These subsets, or perspectives, are named and then accessed from the Tools
menu, which provides a sub-menu for switching between them. The current
perspective is shown in brackets in the lower left of Wing's window.

Perspective Manager

The Tools menu also contains an item for displaying the Perspective
Manager. The Perspective Manager shows the name
of each perspective, whether or not the perspective is shared, whether or
not the perspective is auto-saved, the perspective style, and the key binding
(if any) that is assigned to it.

The name of a perspective can be changed by clicking on the name within the
list and editing it in place.

When perspectives are shared, they are stored in the shared perspectives file,
which is configured with the Shared Perspective File
preference, instead of in the project file. This makes the shared perspectives
available across all projects, or potentially to multiple users. When multiple
instances of Wing share this file, Wing will watch for changes and auto-reload
the set of perspectives into each instance of Wing, as another instance makes
changes. Note that when a shared perspective is un-shared, it is moved into
the project currently open in the instance of Wing that un-shared it.

When the Auto-save Perspectives is set
to ConfiguredbyPerspective, the Perspective Manager will include a
column to specify whether the perspective should be auto-saved before
transitioning to another perspective. This is described in more detail
below.

The perspective style can be used to control how much state is stored in the
perspective: By default Wing stores only the overall layout of the GUI and
set of tools present. Setting this to "Tools and Editors" will cause
the perspective to control also which editors are open. Setting it to
"All Visual State" will store also the detailed state of the tools and editors,
including scroll position, selection, search strings, tree expansion states,
and so forth.

When a key binding is defined, that key sequence will cause Wing to switch to
the associated perspective.

Perspective Manager Context Menu

The Perspective Manager provides the following functionality in its context
(right-click) menu:

New creates a new untitled perspective with the current state
of the application.

Duplicate makes a copy of the selected perspective, including
its stored application state.

Delete removes the selected perspective.

Set Key Binding displays a dialog in which the key binding desired for
the perspective can be typed. This key sequence will cause Wing to switch
to that perspective.

Update with Current State replaces the stored state for the selected
perspective with the current application state.

Restore Saved State loads the state stored in the selected perspective
without making that perspective current.

Preferences

The Perspective Manager's Configure button displays the preferences
that control how perspectives work. These include:

Auto-save Perspectives --
Selects when the current GUI state should be auto-saved into a perspective
before switching to another perspective. Always will always auto-save all
perspectives, Never disables auto-save entirely, Prompt causes Wing to
prompt each time when leaving a perspective, and ConfiguredbyPerspective
allows the behavior to be controlled for each perspective, in the Manage
Perspectives dialog. The default is Always so that the last application
state is always restored when returning to the perspective. Disabling auto-save
can be useful for perspectives that should always start with a previously
stored fixed state.

Shared Perspective File --
This is used to specify where shared perspectives are stored on disk. The
default is a file perspectives in the User Settings Directory.

Auto-Perspectives

Auto-perspectives can be used to automatically switch between the built-in perspectives
edit and debug when debugging is started and stopped. When this is enabled,
Wing by default will show fewer tools when editing and most of the debugging tools
only while debugging. If the user alters which tools are shown from the defaults,
this will be remembered the next time debug is started or stopped.

Auto-perspectives are off by default and can be turned on with the Automatic
Perspectives
attribute under the Debug tab in ProjectProperties.

Once this is enabled, Wing will save the unnamed pre-existing perspective as
user and will display the appropriate perspective edit or debug
with its default tool set. Note that the perspectives edit and debug
are not created until the first time debugging is started. After that, they
appear in the GotoPerspective sub-menu in the Tools menu and in the
perspective manager.

Restoring Default Toolset

In Wing IDE Pro, the Tools menu item RestoreDefaultToolset will
restore the tools appropriate for the current perspective. If this is any
of the built-in perspectives edit, debug, or diff and the Automatic Perspectives
preference is turned on, then the tool set will differ from that which is used
for user-defined perspectives or when automatic perspectives are disabled.